New Website?
You have just spent months on completing a new redesign for your website. You have wrangled the ideas and feedback from your customers and multiple internal stakeholders in anticipation of the day that you can finally unveil the new website to everyone. What a joyous occasion to see all the hard work pay off!
Now What?!
Now the fun has just begun. Having a fresh new website lays the ground work for continuous improvement. Now that you have the fundamentals it’s time to further consider your users experience and the ever-changing expectations of your customers.
Continuous improvement involves three necessary steps; test, measure and refine. Test your current situation and define important metrics or KPIs. Then continue to modify and supplement to find the highest performing scenarios. You’ll want to consider how site visitors are engaging with your content, whether you are achieving your goals, and other ways to provide a better customer experience.
To simplify things and help get you started, here are three ways to test, measure and refine for continued post-launch success.
A/B Testing
With the right CMS, A/B Testing is easy and allows you to compare variations of design elements, including copy, colors, imagery, and promotions. Once you choose an important element to test, expose different percentages of your site visitors to each version during a specific time frame. The winning variation then becomes the reference point for further optimization tests.
Personalization
Personalization goes beyond simply identifying your users by their account information or cookies. By combining analytics, browsing history, and demographics into a highly tailored user experience you can serve visitors truly relevant content that will increase conversions. Beyond manual rules-based personalization, leveraging machine learning and AI will help serve content and product suggestions that have greater appeal to site visitors. There is no perfect recipe for a personalization strategy, but continued testing and refinement of the content being shown will ultimately lead to better customer engagement.
Learn more about personalization.
Marketing Automation
If you had not already, the launch of a new web site is a great time to implement a marketing automation tool and integrate seamlessly with your content management system. Marketing automation is more than just sending emails. It encompasses your entire customer’s journey and beyond.
Tracking where your customers are engaging with your both online and in real life allows you to make data-driven decisions on where to spend resources. The touch-points you create and track can also be scored to give sales people transparency in to customer’s actions and insight on who to prioritize.
Learn more about Marketing Automation.
Example Marketing Automation Workflow in Episerver Campaign
While you have reached the end of the journey for launching a new website, the new and exciting website of continuous optimization has begun! Continuous refinement and enhancement to the website and digital strategy will lead to a solution that will exceed customer expectations.
